At airports, children often laugh when they see Uxía Martínez Botana (37) with the double bass case sticking out above her. “And at Schiphol people say,” she grins in her best Dutch, “what a shame grrrote guitarrr! In that case, my answer is usually that I am carrying Dracula’s coffin.”
Martínez is back in the Amsterdam dovecote for a while, from where she flies out around the world about five to six times a month. through Europe with the Budapest Festival Orchestra and the baroque ensemble of the Argentinian cellist Sol Gabetta. She also makes chamber music with big names from the classical field, solos and teaches in Barcelona, as the first and only female double bass teacher at a Spanish conservatory.
Martínez encountered enough prejudices. She was too thin, too beautiful, too this and too that. Words that emphasized: double bass, forget it, you are a woman. But “the times they are a-changing“, she quotes singer-songwriter Bob Dylan. “Doing what I do would have been impossible for a woman in the times of the Spanish dictator Franco, with the exception of a few. Nevertheless, half a century after his death, there is still plenty to emancipate, also in classical music, which continues to present us with the same menu over and over again. There is a lack of vision. Large impresarios fill their stables with singers, conductors, pianists, violinists and cellists, because they bring in the most money. They find it interesting who brings in at least 50,000 to 60,000 euros per year. And the rest – no matter how good they are on their instrument – has to figure it out themselves.
And Martínez does so, with her own ingenuity and humor, “because existence is difficult enough and melancholy does not help us in the search for beauty and meaning.” That search for innovation is important to her. In Barcelona, Martínez developed a teaching program called ‘the 360 degree musician’, in which she teaches her students in different genres to achieve a broader musical understanding.
She also released her debut album with three members of the Aviv Quartet last month Mendelssohn X Files out, at least the first CD recording where she herself appears on the cover. Martínez “hijacked” – wrote a German reviewer – the cellist’s chair with her double bass in string quartet music by Mendelssohn. She learned how to make such pieces suitable for her instrument in her early twenties from violinist Gidon Kremer in his ensemble Kremerata Baltica.
“I stay away from Haydn and Mozart: their work is too light-footed for the double bass. My experiments in that direction failed. But Mendelssohn is a different story. Especially his Sixth string quartet – written after the death of his sister Fanny – has a dark character. Here, double bass can add meaningful colors.”
She thinks the string quartet is a pure genre. Ruthless too. “You hear everything. It is one of the greatest forms of expression that humanity has invented; an example of how we can interact better with each other in the social debate. We listen, speak and are soloists, but we subordinate our egos to the musical whole. You have to trust each other to penetrate to what is essential. That is what art is all about: I want to enrich the soul of society.”
“When I was allowed to go to the local music school at the age of six, students were divided alphabetically. And when they ended up with my last name, the cello class was full.”
Photo Marco Borggreve
Crying cow
Martínez grew up as a child from the Atlantic coast in La Coruña, “where it always rains,” she smiles. “So when I went to study in Amsterdam when I was eighteen, the transition wasn’t too big.” She was initially in love with the cello, but fate decided otherwise. “When I was allowed to go to the local music school at the age of six, students were divided alphabetically. When they arrived at my surname, the cello class was full. I could choose between bassoon, horn and double bass. I chose the horn for its beautiful melancholy sound. But my father does not like wind instruments. ‘Do you know what it is about the horn?’ he said. “Then your lips can become deformed, and no boy will want to kiss you anymore.” The joke escaped me as a six year old. So I chose double bass, the cello’s big brother.”
There was no teacher for the instrument, so she mainly learned theory. That experience discouraged the child who wanted to go on stage. Her mother searched and found a teacher two hours away, Witold Patsevich, double bassist of the Moscow Virtuosi.
“He taught me how to make music and how to use my imagination. For each piece he had me draw a picture of the feelings it evoked in me. I remember one memory clearly from the twelve years he had me under his wing. He gave me an old Russian folk song, for which I drew a large crying cow. That was the only time I saw him laugh. I was lucky that my parents found a good teacher. That’s why I teach myself, because I know how important inspiring teachers are in the life.”
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